What IS good, and how do we determine it?

[Esquilax]

To further clear it up for you, I think we instinctively know that treating others well is the moral thing to do. For me though, Christianity has taken it deeper and taught me *why* this is the moral path and why it is important. Also, treating others well is very general and broad. It has also helped me with the finer issues that are more specific.

Thank you for your well thought out answer. This has definitely helped me understand your perspective on the origins of morality.

I can work with that: so, why is it the moral path? If it's just because it happens to be the one god highlighted then I don't much care, because I don't recognize fiat assertions of authority as cogent argumentation. "Because I said so," is never a good reason to do something, least of all if the only reason why you might want to do so is just a second claim to having absolute authority. If you're following god's morals because they come from god then the actual content of the morality is immaterial and irrelevant, since you're following the person and not the moral.

If there are actual reasons why the moral path god has laid out is important, then god isn't required in the least; those reasons are discoverable by any person, christian or not, and they stand whether one is religious or atheist. You shouldn't need to ask "why be good?" if you have in mind the reasons why god has ordered morality the way it is; you already know. If your god is as correct as you believe, then we should naturally come to the same conclusions eventually.

There is, of course, a larger issue at play here too, which is this: how did you determine that god was good? If you're using god's morality as your epistemological road map, what criteria did you use to come to the conclusion that it was the correct map to follow? There had to have been some; you've clearly concluded that god is good, so how did you get to that point? You can't have used god's morality to determine god's morality, because the evaluation that it is good had to have happened before you had concluded that evaluation. I don't even need to point out the circular reasoning involved there, as a simple matter of chronology, you could not have come to the conclusion before you came to it.